She felt, too, that she was still relying almost entirely on guesswork to take this investigation forward. It seemed probable that Fathers Heaney, Quinlan, O’Gara and ó Súllabháin had deliberately castrated young orphan boys in order to make their choir the finest in Ireland. Their spiritual motive appeared to have been to please God so much that He would deign to make Himself visible in some way, although how this could happen was not clear. Maybe they had expected it to happen for real, so that everybody would witness His appearance, and see heaven. On the other hand, maybe they thought that it would happen only inside their own minds, a private revelation for them alone.
What she couldn’t work out, though, was Monsignor Kelly’s involvement. She strongly suspected that he knew what had happened to the van with the crozier on the back, and she even suspected that he had a strong idea who had murdered Father Heaney and Father Quinlan. Yet she couldn’t understand why he had been so eager to blame Brendan Doody. And where was Brendan Doody – alive or dead?
Not only that, where in the name of Jesus was Jimmy O’Rourke? She was beginning to grow seriously worried about him.
She closed her laptop, finished her sandwich and went into the hall to take down her raincoat. Barney came bustling after her, his tail whacking from side to side.
‘Sorry, boy. No walkies just yet. I’ll try to take you out when I get home.’
Barney made that keening noise in the back of his throat. She loved him dearly, but she was beginning to think that it was very unfair of her to keep a dog as boisterous and needy as an Irish setter when she couldn’t take him for regular exercise or give him the attention he deserved. What was more, John had given him to her, and supposing she decided to let John go off to America and not go with him? Barney would be a constant reminder of the chance that she had given up, and the love that she had sacrificed.
She hunkered down and stroked him and tugged at his ears, which made him snuffle and stick out his tongue and dance excitedly on the carpet.
‘What would you do, Barney? Stay or go? Go or stay?’
Barney cocked his head to one side, and gave her a sympathetic wuff.
It was already growing dark as she drove up towards Sallybrook. On her left, the huge oak trees were as black as blotches of Indian ink. On her right, she could see the wide curve of the River Glashaboy, reflecting the sky. She had always thought that there was something very secretive about rivers at night. No wonder so many people committed suicide in Cork by throwing themselves in the river. They knew that it would carry away all of their despair, and tell no one.
Paul McKeown lived in a large house halfway up a winding hill called Glen Richmond. It was a newish house, very neat, with a steep asphalt drive and a recently planted rockery and a double garage with white-painted doors. Katie climbed out of her car, walked up to the front door and pushed the bell, which rang with a full Westminster chime. A light went on behind the stained-glass window over the porch, and she could see a figure coming down the stairs, changing colour as it did so, from red to green to yellow.
He opened the door and said, ‘Superintendent Maguire?’
‘Mr McKeown. Sorry I had to call on you so late.’
She recognized him from the newspaper photograph of the rally outside the diocesan offices on Redemption Road. Tall – very tall – at least six feet three – with dark brown hair that was wavy rather than curly as it appeared in the photograph, but then it had been raining that day. He must have been about forty-two years old, and his hair was a little too long for his age, but it immediately told Katie a lot about his personality: non-conformist; quite artistic; somewhat vain.
He was extremely handsome, in a dark, slightly satanic way. He had a long face with a straight nose and sharply chiselled cheeks, and a strong, angular chin. His eyes were greyish-blue, the colour of a cloudy afternoon sky. He was wearing a very white shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up and a pair of indigo jeans with a plaited brown leather belt.
‘Come on in,’ he told her. She stepped inside and he took her through to a large living room with a polished oak floor and burgundy leather sofas. The decor was very minimalist. Above the fireplace hung a 42-inch plasma television, but there were no pictures or photographs anywhere. In the far corner stood a green bronze statuette of an angel at prayer, her wings spread wide, but apart from half a dozen white roses in a clear glass vase in the middle of the coffee table, that was the only decoration.
‘Sit down, please,’ he told her. ‘Like I said on the phone, I don’t know what I can do to help you.’
Katie sat on one of the leather sofas. ‘You could help me by telling me the truth,’ she said, giving him one of her really disarming smiles, her eyes all twinkly.
‘The truth?’ said Paul McKeown. ‘I haven’t said anything to you yet, so could I be lying to you?’
‘You told me on the phone that your wife had gone to her book club.’
‘I did, yes. What of it? She goes every Thursday.’
‘You’re not married, Mr McKeown. I looked you up in our records before I came up here. You’re on Wikipedia, too. You used to be married to Caoimhe ó Faoláin, the poet, the one who wrote The Flowers of Cashel Beg, but you were divorced three years ago.’
Paul McKeown didn’t seem to be at all abashed that Katie had caught him out. He gave her a nonchalant shrug and said, ‘Okay. I always tell people that I’m still married, especially women. I suppose you could say that it’s a defence mechanism. The trouble with being Paul McKeown is that women either have a prurient interest in what was done to me, or they think they can help me to forget it – often both.’
‘All right, I’ll forgive you this one time,’ Katie told him, not very seriously. But then she said, ‘I told you why I wanted to talk to you. We urgently need some help to identify who might have murdered Father Heaney and Father Quinlan. So far as we know, they’re currently holding another priest who came under suspicion for molestation, Father Gerry O’Gara, and they may have abducted a fourth, Father Michael ó Súllabháin.
‘I have to caution you that all of this is absolutely confidential at this stage of our inquiry, but we have notebooks kept by Father Heaney that describe how these four priests were brought in to form a choir at St Joseph’s Orphanage.’
‘Go on,’ said Paul McKeown. From the tone of his voice, she had the feeling that he knew, or at least suspected, what she was going to say next.
‘I’ll be blunt about it. At some stage, it appears that these four decided that the choir could only reach the height of musical perfection if some or all of the boys in it were castrated, like the choirboys in the Vatican in the sixteenth century. So that’s what they did. They castrated them. That’s according to Father Heaney’s notebooks, anyhow, so we have to be a little wary about the veracity of it. There’s a lot of cat’s malogian in those notebooks, too – about seeing God face to face, and heaven being a real place. So what he wrote about could have been nothing more than the sadomasochistic fantasies of a very frustrated priest. But on balance we don’t think so.’
Paul McKeown thought about this for a very long time before he said anything, his hands steepled in front of his face so that Katie couldn’t clearly see his expression. Then he suddenly stood up and said, ‘Let me get you a drink, superintendent. You look like a vodka lady to me.’
‘I’d love one, to tell you the truth, but I’m working, and I expect to be working for the rest of the night, and through tomorrow morning, too.’
‘You’re sure? In that case, let me press you to a cup of tea, maybe, or coffee. Or a soft drink.’
‘All right, then. Anything will do. Fizzy orange if you have it.’
He went through to the kitchen and came back shortly afterwards with a glass of bitter lemon for Katie, with ice and a slice of lemon in it, and a Satzenbrau lager for himself, which he drank straight out of the bottle.
‘I’ve heard about boys at St Joseph’s being given the snip,’ he said, when he had sat down again. ‘There have
been all kinds of rumours and stories about it for years, but nobody has once come out and said it straight.’
‘You think it’s true, then?’
‘I’m sure of it, superintendent. But I think that a combination of factors has kept it quiet. Let me tell you this: I decided to form the Cork Survivors’ Society in the summer of 1998, when I was twenty-nine years old. I was serially abused by the priests at the school I went to, and by one priest in particular. During that summer, purely by chance, I met three or four young men who had suffered similar experiences at their schools.
‘None of us liked to talk about it at first. You don’t want to, because it brings it all back to you, and when you grow older you can never understand how you allowed it to happen. I still wonder, after all of these years, if I was partly to blame. The worst thing of all is that some of the abuse was actually enjoyable, and it takes a very strong and well-balanced personality to admit to that.
‘By forming the CSS, we were admitting openly that we had been molested by the priests who were supposed to be taking care of us, and we were actively seeking help and support from each other, and the community around us. Legal help, financial help, but most of all psychological help. We were also naming names, and making specific accusations against specific priests. On top of that, we were demanding that such abuse should never happen again, ever, not to one more little boy or one more little girl.’
He leaned forward, looking at Katie with a seriousness that made her think that he would have made a good priest himself, especially one to whom you could confess all your doubts.
‘I’ll tell you something, superintendent, the resistance we came up against... well, I expect you know yourself what was done to keep us quiet. They promised us full and open inquiries, but all we got was secret reviews by the diocesan officials themselves, and frantic cover-ups. They promised us punishments – defrockings, dismissals – but all that happened was that the offending priests were moved to other parishes, where, of course, they continued to molest the children in their charge. The Garda Síochána assured us that they would investigate every accusation thoroughly, and that criminal proceedings would follow if they were provable and justified, but not a single criminal case was ever brought.
‘It was all too long ago, and there was no forensic evidence. No priestly pubic hairs or gym shorts with dried semen on them for DNA tests. No witnesses, either, for the most part. No witnesses who weren’t too frightened or embarrassed to speak out, anyway.’
He paused again, and then he said, ‘Yes... we heard all kinds of stories about the boys in St Joseph’s Orphanage Choir. But once they joined the choir they were kept apart from the rest of the children, except during lessons, and they were all given special treatment. They were fed better, and given their own dormitory, and they were excused games and gymnastics.
‘There were so many rumours about why they were treated so well, and some of those rumours came very close to the truth, like the rumour that they had paschal candles pushed up their backsides to make them sing higher. But not one of the boys themselves ever admitted what had really been done to them – not one – and after the choir was disbanded, and the boys grew up, not one of them ever made a formal complaint.
‘I made enquiries, believe me, and tried to find out the truth of the matter, but their lips were sealed tight, all of them.
‘The church was still capable of striking the fear of God into them, and they weren’t only threatened with damnation, believe me. They were physically threatened, too – both them and their families. You think the criminal gangs of Cork have their heavies... you should see some of the muscle that the church employs. All very discreetly, of course, Hail Mary, full of grace, Our Lord is with thee, thump!’
Katie said, ‘Well... they may have been too scared before now, but we think it’s likely that one or more of those boys from St Joseph’s has at last found the bottle to take his revenge. What I need, Paul, is names.’
‘I’m sorry. I can remember only about four of them, and at least three of them are dead now.’
‘That’s a surprise. Castrati are supposed to live longer than your average man.’
‘Not if they kill themselves, they don’t.’
‘What about the fourth?’
‘Don’t know. Haven’t heard from him in years.’
‘You can still tell me his name.’
‘Denis Sweeney. He called me in the last week of 1999 and said that two of his friends from St Joseph’s Choir had gassed themselves in their car and did I want to know why? He said he would meet me in the Long Valley on Winthrop Street and tell me all about it.’
‘And?’
‘I went to meet him but he never showed. I never heard from him again.’
‘Are you sure you can’t remember any of the others?’
‘There were twins, I remember that. Very shy and never spoke to anybody. I think their name might have been Phelan.’
‘Well, that might help us,’ said Katie.
‘Do you think these two missing priests might be murdered like the other two?’ Paul McKeown asked her.
‘Tortured and murdered, yes. I think there’s a very high probability. And half of what was done to Father Heaney and Father Quinlan we haven’t released to the press.’
Paul McKeown said, ‘What price can you put on a child’s lost innocence? How much should you pay for deliberately taking away a boy’s opportunity to become a man?’
They sat together in silence for a moment. Somewhere in the distance they heard the grumbling of thunder, or it may have been a plane landing at Cork airport, sixteen kilometres off to the south-west.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to help you very much, superintendent,’ said Paul McKeown. ‘But I’ll ask around. One or two members of CSS might have a better memory than I have.’
‘Thank you,’ she told him. ‘And you can call me Katie if you like. “Superintendent” always makes me feel frumpy, and old.’
Paul McKeown stood up. ‘Thank you, Katie. You’re anything but that, if you don’t mind my saying so. I was expecting a high-ranking lady detective to have iron-grey hair and steel-rimmed spectacles, but when I opened the door, I have to tell you that I was very pleasantly surprised.’
Katie was about to tell him to get away with himself when her mobile phone warbled. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and flipped it open.
‘Superintendent ma’am? It’s me again, Patrick.’
‘What is it this time? Don’t tell me another priest has gone missing?’
‘No, ma’am. The opposite. There’s been a fire at a derelict farm cottage about two kilometres west of Killeens. The fire brigade have just called us to say that they’ve discovered a body inside, all trussed up with wire. From the way they described it, it sounds as if it could be Father O’Gara.’
‘Oh, shite,’ said Katie.
Paul McKeown looked at her quizzically, raising one eyebrow.
‘I expect you’ll see it on the news tomorrow,’ Katie told him. ‘Meanwhile, like I said before, I don’t think I have much prospect of getting any sleep tonight.’
39
She smelled the burned-out cottage long before she reached it – a bitter, black smell that was blown into her car through the vents in the dashboard. Then she turned a corner of the narrow country road and saw the blue and orange flashing lights in a field about two thirds of a kilometre off to her right, and tungsten floodlights.
She drove down the bumpy track that led to the cottage. Both red fire engines from the sub-station at Ballyvolane were parked at an angle beside the still-smoking building, as well as a fire brigade jeep. A Garda squad car and Detective O’Donovan’s car were parked nearby.
She parked her own car as close to Detective O’Donovan’s as she could, to allow room for the technical unit’s van when they eventually arrived. She climbed out and Detective O’Donovan was there to greet her, unshaven, wearing his old brown leather jacket and pale blue jeans. He looked as washed out and b
aggy-eyed as she felt.
‘What’s the story?’ she asked him.
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘The fire was called in by a passing truck driver about twenty past ten. He said the flames were jumping up fifty feet into the air.’
Close to the cottage, the drifting smoke made Katie’s eyes water. Detective O’Donovan led her across to the far side of the building, where a fire officer was standing talking to three firefighters as they rolled up their hoses. The fire officer had slicked-back hair and a pointed nose and reminded Katie of Bono from U2, even down to the amber-lensed sunglasses that he was wearing.
‘Ah, the famous Detective Superintendent Kathleen Maguire,’ he greeted her, with a grin that bared his teeth. ‘Wasn’t I reading all about you just the other day in the Echo? All them Romanian pimps you collared. Good on you.’
Katie gave him a much tighter smile in response. ‘We’ve got ourselves a body here, then?’
‘Right inside, in the bedroom. He’s been badly burned, your man, but he wasn’t burned by this fire, and he didn’t die of smoke inhalation.’
Katie looked around at the outside of the cottage. It must have been at least eighty or ninety years old, maybe more. The walls were made of rough stone which had been rendered with a thick mix of lime and cement and painted pink. Now the pink was disfigured with patterns of jet-black soot, which looked as if exultant demons had danced wildly all around the cottage to celebrate its burning, and left their shadows behind.
Part of the roof had collapsed, but the single chimney stack remained. All of the plants and weeds around the walls had shrivelled, and all of the windows had been stained brown by smoke and cracked, or had dropped out altogether.
‘This looks as if it was started deliberately,’ said Katie. ‘Like somebody poured an accelerant all the way around the cottage walls and then set it alight.’
Broken Angels (Katie Maguire) Page 27